Early Modern Japan and the Problem of “Drugs”

Legal distinctions of licit and illicit drugs are a construct of modern legislation, but humans have been using and regulating substances based on different principles long before the emergence of modern body politics. By 1900, Japan disciplined domestic and colonial populations with scientific hygiene policies and pervasive moral education. The emergence of the imperial body politic is commonly seen as the product of institutional and ideological reforms of the Japanese enlightenment in the Meiji Period (1868–1912). A closer look at the evolution of concepts and institutions that informed substance regulation since the seventeenth century, however, reveals commercial globalization and geopolitical transformations, as crucial tensions in the longer evolution of medical theories and regulatory practices. Mercantilist concerns legitimized monopolies and inspired the issue of sumptuary laws in the early modern period, but by the mid-nineteenth century, public health and the demographic development linked to it had become a geopolitical interest and a question state security. This chapter offers an overview of internal and external factors in this process. I argue that an “industrious revolution” politicized health and salubrious behavior, emphasizing connections between physical condition and personal choice. This paved the way for crucial concepts that dominated the discourse on medicine and public health in the late nineteenth century.